The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published VoiceXML 2.0 and Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) as W3C Recommendations. The goal of VoiceXML 2.0 is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications. The announcement marks the advancement to Recommendation status of the first two specifications in W3C’s Speech Interface Framework. Aimed at the world’s estimated two billion fixed line and mobile phones, W3C’s Speech Interface Framework will allow people to use any telephone to interact with appropriately designed Web-based services via key pads, spoken commands, listening to pre-recorded speech, synthetic speech and music. In the W3C Speech Interface Framework, VoiceXML controls how the application interacts with the user, while the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is used for spoken prompts and the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) for guiding the speech recognizers via grammars that describe the expected user responses. Other specifications in the Framework include Voice Browser Call Control (CCXML), and Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, which defines how speech grammars bind to application semantics. www.w3.org